[ Ex-FBI official McGonigal worked for a sanctioned Russian
oligarch, prosecutors say. Earlier, he was in charge of investigating
the Trump campaigns Russian connections. Historian Timothy Snyder lays
out the tangled web of facts.]
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TRUMP, RUSSIA AND THE INDICTED EX-FBI AGENT  
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Timothy Snyder
January 26, 2023
Thinking about...
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_ Ex-FBI official McGonigal worked for a sanctioned Russian oligarch,
prosecutors say. Earlier, he was in charge of investigating the Trump
campaign's Russian connections. Historian Timothy Snyder lays out the
tangled web of facts. _

,

 

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles
McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve
foreign interests.  One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000
from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the
FBI's New York office.  Another charge is that McGonigal took money
from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after
McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI.  Deripaska, a hugely
wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite
industrialist
[[link removed]],"
was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had
investigated in 2016.  Deripaska has been under American sanctions
since 2018.  Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor,
of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications.
One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier.
In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of
a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian
oligarch.  And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with
investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to
work (according to the indictment
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for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska).  This is obviously
very bad for Trump personally.  But it is also very bad for FBI New
York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America. 

Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation
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Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response.
Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary
Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win.  We might like to
think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be
immune to such an operation.  Now we are reliably informed that a
trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this
sort of operation, was corrupt.  And again, the issue is not just the
particular person.  If someone as important as McGonigal could take
money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to
work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what
is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York
office.  The larger issue is the health of our national discussions
of politics and the integrity of our election process.

For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling
memory.  In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber
counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge
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counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  That April,
I broke
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story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime,
on the basis of Russian open sources.  At the time, almost no one
wanted to take this connection seriously.  American journalists
wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar
Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia.  Too few
people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too
few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people
who took all three seriously felt very small.  Yet there was also
specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared,
but something worse.  After I wrote that piece
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I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New
York.  This was no secret at the time.  One did not need to be close
to such matters to get that drift. 
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given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber
counterintelligence, this was worrying

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.

The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin
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in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is
my area of expertise.  Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to
control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016
in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money,
and a pliable candidate for head of state.  When that failed, Russia
had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence
operations.  (If you find that you do not remember the Russian
invasion
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in 2014
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it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian
propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to
vulnerabilities.)  The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia
to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and
institutions.  This is what I was working on in 2016
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when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.

To this observer of Ukraine, it was apparent that Russia was backing
Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president
Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control.  Trump and
Yanukovych were similar figures
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nihilistic, venal, seeking power to make or shield money.  This made
them vulnerably eager partners for Putin.  And they had the same
chief advisor: the American political consultant Paul Manafort. 
Russian soft control of Trump did not require endless personal
meetings between the two principals.  It just required mutual
understanding, which was abundantly on display during the Trump
presidency: think of the meeting between Putin and Trump in Helsinki
in 2018 [[link removed]], when the
American president said that he trusted the Russian one and the
Russian president said that he had supported the American one as a
candidate.  The acknowledgement of mutual debts was obvious already
in 2016: Russian media talked up Trump, and Trump talked up Putin. 

During Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the rapprochement between
Trump and Putin could be effected through intermediaries.  An obvious
intermediary was Paul Manafort: first he worked for the Russian
oligarch Deripaska as a consultant to teach the Kremlin how to
influence Americans.  Then he worked for Russia's man in Ukraine
Yanukovych, helping to get him elected.  Finally Manafort worked for
Trump, in the same capacity.  You might remember Manafort's ties to
Russia as revealed by the press in 2016.  He (and Jared Kushner, and
Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower. 
Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager that August after
it become public he had received $12.7 million in cash while he was
working Yanukovych and had not reported it.  

By 2016, when he was Trump's campaign manager, Manafort owed Deripaska
millions of dollars.  At the end of their political collaboration,
they had entered into a murky investment, at the end of which
Deripaska was pursuing Manafort in court.  Manafort acknowledged the
debt to Deripaska, in the sense that he treated his work for Trump as
a way to pay it off.  As Trump's campaign manager, and as Deripaska's
debtor, Manafort wrote to offer Deripaska "private briefings" on
Trump's campaign.  Through an intermediary, Manafort sent the
Russians data from the Trump campaign, including campaign polling data
about Americans that would be useful for influence operations. 
Manafort was asked to communicate a Russian plan for the partition of
Ukraine to Trump. Manafort was hoping to pay Deripaska back in a
currency other than money -- in Manafort's own words, "to get
whole."  (These and other details are in _Road to Unfreedom.
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Thinking our way back to 2016,
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in mind Russia's pattern of seeking soft control, recalling what we
know now, let's now reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin
connection that year.  After Trump became president, he and some
other Republicans claimed that the FBI had overreached by carrying out
any sort of investigation at all.  Now that McGonigal has been
arrested, Trump has claimed that this somehow helps his case.  Common
sense suggests the opposite.  The man who was supposed to investigate
Russian support of Trump then took money from a Russian oligarch close
to Putin, who was at one remove from the Trump campaign at the time? 
That is not at all a constellation that supports Trump's version of
events.  If the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was investigating
Trump's connection to Russia was on the payroll of the Russian
oligarch (Deripaska) to whom Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) owed
millions of dollars and provided information, that does not look good
for Trump.  It looks hideous —but not just for Trump.

Anne Applebaum once
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the question the right way: why didn't the FBI investigate Trump’s
connections to Putin _much earlier?_  In retrospect, it seems as
though the FBI investigation of Trump’s campaign and its Russian
connections in 2016 was not only late, but
weirdly _understated._  Known as "Cross-Fire Hurricane," it defined
the issue of Russian influence narrowly, as a matter of personal
contact between Trump campaign officials and Russians.  Meanwhile, as
that investigation was going on, Russia was in the middle of a major
social media campaign which, according to the leading scholar of
presidential communications,
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it possible for Trump to be elected.  And that larger influence
campaign was not investigated by the FBI, let alone countered. 

If anything, it looks as though the New York office of the FBI,
wittingly or unwittingly, rather _pushed in the same direction_ than
resisted Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation.  As no doubt
everyone remembers, Russia was able to phish for emails from
institutions and people around Clinton, and used some of them, out of
context, to create harmful fictional narratives about her. 
Simultaneously, there was a concern about Clinton's use of a private
email server.  In the popular mind, these two issues blurred
together, with Trump's help.  Trump asked the Russians to break into
Clinton's email account, which they immediately tried to do. 
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about Clinton's emails proved to be of interest.  The FBI closed an
investigation in July 2016, saying that there was no basis for
criminal charges against Clinton. 

Then, weirdly, FBI director James Comey announced on 28 October 2016,
just ten days before the election, that the investigation into
Clinton's emails had been reopened.  This created a huge brouhaha
that (as polls showed) harmed Clinton and helped Trump.  The
investigation was closed again after only eight days, on 6 November,
with no charges against Clinton.  But that was just two days before
the election, and the damage was done.  As I recall it, in the fury
of those last forty-eight hours, no one noticed Comey's second
announcement, closing the investigation and clearing Clinton.  I was
canvassing at the time, and the people I spoke to were still quite
excited about the emails.  Why would the FBI publicly reveal an
investigation on a hot issue involving a presidential candidate right
before an election?  It now appears that Comey made the public
announcement because of an illicit kind of pressure
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special agents in the FBI New York office.  Comey believed that they
would leak
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investigation if he did not announce it.

In office, Trump knew that Russia had worked to get him elected, but
the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself
by saying that he personally had not colluded.  The Mueller Report,
which I still don't believe many people have actually read,
demonstrated that there was a multidimensional Russian influence
campaign on behalf of Trump.  The Trump administration countered by
claiming that there was no evidence that Trump personally had been in
contact with Putin personally.  That defense was certainly
misleading; but it was available in part because of the narrow scope
of FBI investigations in 2016.

To be fair, FBI, along with Homeland Security, did investigate
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But this was after the election when it could make no difference; and
in the report, cyber was defined narrowly, limited to phishing and the
breach of systems.  These are important issues, but they were not the
main issue.  What the phishing and breach of systems _enabled_ was
the main issue: a social media campaign
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exploited emotions, including misogyny, to mobilize and demobilize
voters. 

Russia used the raw email in specific operations on Trump's behalf,
for example by rescuing him from the Access Hollywood tapes scandal. 
Right after it emerged that Trump advocated sexual assault, Russia
released a fictional scandal connecting Clinton to the abuse of
children.  That allowed Trump's followers to believe that whatever he
did, she was worse; and the scandal was blunted.  It verges on
inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia's 2016 influence
campaign on behalf of Trump.  He knew the players; he is now alleged
to have been employed by one of them.  Even I was aware
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the Russia's 2016 influence campaign.  It became one of the subjects
of my book _Road to Unfreedom,_ which I finished the following
year. 

The Russian influence campaign was an issue for American
counterintelligence.  It is worth pausing to understand why, since it
helps us to see the centrality of McGonigal and the meaning of this
scandal.  Intelligence is about trying to understand. 
Counterintelligence is about making that hard for others.  Branching
out from counterintelligence are the more exotic operations designed
to make an enemy not only misunderstand the situation, but also act on
the basis of misunderstandings, against the enemy's own interests. 
Such operations, which have been a Russian (or Soviet) specialty for
more than a century, go under the name of "provocation," or "active
measures," or "maskirovka."  It is the task of counterintelligence to
understand active measures, and prevent them from working.  The
Russian influence operation on behalf of Trump was an active measure
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the United States failed to halt.  The cyber element, the use of
social media, is what McGonigal personally, with his background and in
his position, should have been making everyone aware of.  In 2016,
McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence
Coordination Section.  That October, he was put in charge
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the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's New York office.  

And it was just then, in October 2016, that matters began to spin out
of control.  There were two moments, late in the presidential
campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump.  The first was
when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7
October).  The second was FBI director James Comey's public
announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary
Clinton's emails (28 October).  The reason Comey made that public
announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the
election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that
the matter was likely of great consequence.  On his account, it was
that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it
anyway.  Rudolph Giuliani had apparently already been the beneficiary
of leaks; claimed to know in advance of what he called a "surprise"
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would help Donald Trump, namely Comey's public announcement of the
email investigation.  

It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New
York who wanted Trump to win.  Comey has now confirmed this, although
his word choice might be different.  And I did wonder, back then, if
those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played.  It
was no secret at the time
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FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton.  Making
emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited.  For people
working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to
do.  The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are
not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's
active measure.  Someone else will take advantage of your known
vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific
female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male
politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that
feels like your own decision. 

Now that we are informed that a central figure in the New York FBI
office was willing to take money from foreign actors while on the job,
this line of analysis bears some reconsideration.  Objectively, FBI
New York was acting in concert with Russia, ignoring or defining
narrowly Russia's actions, and helping deliver the one-two punch to
Clinton in October that very likely saved Trump.  When people act in
the interest of a foreign power, it is sometimes for money, it is
sometimes because the foreign power knows something about them, it is
sometimes for ideals, and it is sometimes for no conscious motive at
all -- what one thinks of as one's own motives have been curated,
manipulated, and directed.  It seems quite possible -- I raise it as
a hypothesis that reasonable people would consider -- that some
mixture of these factors was at work at FBI New York in 2016.

All of these pieces of recent history must hang together in one way or
another, and the fresh and shocking revelation of McGonigal's arrest
is a chance for us to try to see how.  Again, if these allegations
are true, they will soon be surrounded by other heretofore unknown
facts, which should lead us to consider the problem of election
integrity in a general way.  As of right now, the circumstantial
evidence suggests that we consider the possibility that the FBI's
reporting work in 2016, which resulted in a framing of the issue which
was convenient for Trump and Russia, might have had something to do
with the fact (per the indictments) that one of its lead agents
was willing to take
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from foreign actors while on the job.  In connection with the leaks
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FBI New York late in the 2016 campaign, which had the obvious effect
of harming Clinton and helping Trump, McGonigal's arrest also demands
a broader rethink of the scale of the 2016 disaster.  How much was
FBI New York, wittingly and unwittingly, caught up in a Russian active
measure? 

The charges have not been proven.  If they are, it would be a bit
surprising if the two offenses with which McGonigal is now charged
were isolated events.  There is a certain danger, apparently, in
seeing them this way, and letting bygones be bygones.  A U.S.
attorney presenting the case said that McGonigal "should have known
better"; that is the kind of thing one says when a child gets a
bellyache after eating too much cotton candy at the county fair; it
hardly seems to correspond to the gravity of the situation. 

Failing to understand the Russian threat in the 2010s was a prelude to
failing to understand the Russian threat in 2020s.  And today
Americans who support Russia in its war of atrocity tend to be members
of the Trump family or people closely aligned with Trump, such
as Giuliani
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The people who helped Trump then take part in the war on Ukraine now.
Consider one of the main architects of Russia's 2016 campaign to
support Trump, Yevgeny Prigozhin
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2016, his relevant position was as the head of the Internet Research
Agency;
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were the very people who (for example) helped spread the story about
Clinton that rescued Trump from the Access Hollywood scandal. 
Without the Internet Research Agency covering his back, Trump would
have had a much harder time in the 2016 election.  Today, during the
war in Ukraine, Prigozhin is now better known as the owner of Wagner
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sending tens of thousands of Russian prisoners to kill and die. 

The implications of the arrest go further.  McGonigal had authority
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sensitive investigations where the specific concern was that there was
an American giving away other Americans to foreign governments. 
Untangling what that means will require a concern for the United
States that goes beyond party loyalty.  Unfortunately, some key
political figures seem to be reacting to the news in the opposite
spirit: suppressing the past, thereby destabilizing the future. 
Immediately after the McGonigal story broke, House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff
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the House intelligence committee, in a grand exhibition of
indifference to national security.  A veteran of that committee,
Schiff has has taken the time to learn about Russia.  It is grotesque
to exclude him at this particular moment, in the middle of a war, and
at the beginning of a spy scandal

McCarthy's recent move against Schiff also recalls 2016, sadly.  Much
as I did, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had an inkling, back then, that
something was wrong with Trump and Russia.  He expressed his view
that June that Donald Trump was the Republican most likely to be
taking money from Vladimir Putin.  This showed a fine political
instinct, sadly unmatched by any ethical follow-through.  McCarthy
did not share his suspicion with his constituents, nor do anything to
follow through.  He made the remark it in a conversation with other
Republican House members,
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did not disagree with him, and who apparently came to the conclusion
the the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important
than American national security.  Republicans in the Senate, sadly,
took a similar view.  They deliberately marginalized a CIA
investigation that did address the Russian influence campaign for
Trump.  In September 2016, Mitch McConnell made it clear to the Obama
administration that the CIA's findings would be treated as political
if they were discussed in public.  The Obama administration bowed to
this pressure.

The Russian operation to get Trump elected in 2016 was real.  We are
still living under the specter of 2016, and we are closer to the
beginning of the process or learning about it than we are to the
end.  Denying that it happened, or acting as though it did not
happen, makes the United States vulnerable to Russian influence
operations that are still ongoing, sometimes organized by the same
people.  It is easy to forget about 2016, and human to want to do
so.  But democracy is about learning from mistakes, and this arrest
makes it very clear that we still have much to learn.

_Timothy Snyder is an American historian of Europe and a public
intellectual on both continents. Among his books are On Tyranny and
Bloodlands, which appear in new editions in 2022. His work inspires
art and music, and is read at protests around the world._

_Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new
posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber
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